mynamesadam
Registered
Evening all 
Just joined up and thought I'd start of by creating my own tank diary to kick things off. I see lots of others using a Bio Reef 94L so am hoping to pick up some tips and tricks on what mods are possible etc.
I'll start off with day 1...
The last time I kept marines was almost 10 years ago - had a 300l FOWLR tank, but the cost of keeping it was too much back then. Anyway I recently had the idea to get another tank, but didn't want to go mad and get something big straight away (famous last words!) so decided to start small and apply the "quality over quantity" principle!
Found a friendly LFS a month ago and picked up a Kent Marine bio reef. The next day I picked up some water and live rock, and spent the afternoon putting it all together. This is definitely the exciting part!
I'm using 40lbs of fuji pink live sand and have 5kg of live rock so far. I know I need to get another 5kg or so, but I'm looking for some good pieces as the pieces I had that day didn't have as much fauna as I was expecting (I bought about 50kg for the last tank and it was pretty fresh!). Here's the tank with the sand and rock in place, with one of three 25l cans of saltwater being mixed/heated.
I set up the chambers as follows :
1. Heater
2. Filter floss (bought some of that)
3. Bag of carbon in the bottom and skimmer on top
4. Return pump
I binned the ceramic media etc. as advised by the LFS and folks on this forum. I intend to just swap out the floss and carbon as and when required and eventually add some phos-zorb. The filter seems OK although that return pump is a little weak - I appreciate why so many people here swap that out for something a little more powerful.
Starting to fill it up and immediately feel a little disappointed with the weedy amount of LR I bought! Still, was planning on visiting a couple of places later that week so will hopefully get some nice pieces.
Having read up that night I also bought a Red Sea reef mature pro kit, and a Red Sea marine care test kit. I intend to try out that 21 day cycling - mainly because it gives me something to do everyday! Finally got the last of the water in and everything is switched on...
I chucked in the couple of sachets of Biomagnet that came with the live sand. Figured it couldn't hurt and will speed up the water clearing. Temp is 26 °C and salinity 1.026 - a little at the high end so will keep an eye on that.
So now the waiting game I guess - I intended to go shopping for some more LR the next day and hopefully the water would have cleared up by then. Will start using the reef mature kit too which should start everything off nicely!
Now day 4 for the new tank and it seems to be cycling nicely.
I picked up another 5kg of live rock - a nice mix of regular Fiji and bluestone. It makes the existing live rock look all the more drab! I spent ages moving it all around trying to get it arranged nicely, and have so far settled on how it is in the pic below. Still not sure 100% though!
The three things I was trying to achieve were 1) hide the "ugly" live rock, 2) create plenty of flat surfaces thinking ahead for when I start adding corals etc. and 3) have some sort of seabed in the middle.
The thing on the left is a brine shrimp hatchery!
Couple more pics of the rock closer up...
You can see the diatom bloom has started on the piece at the back. And again here...
I've been following the Red Sea reef mature program and so far levels are as follows :
Salinity : 1.025
pH : 7.6 (seems very low, but I've changed the pump output to agitate the surface of the water so will keep an eye on this over the next week and see what happens. Also I'm raising the alkalinity up to 3 meq/l so as I far as I understand this should raise the pH too)
KH : 2.68
Ammonia : 0.4
Nitrite : 0.1
Nitrate : 0
Odd thing is though, according to the Red Sea documentation I should be seeing approximately :
Ammonia : 1
Nitrite : 0.1
Nitrate : 10-15
Ammonia and Nitrite I can believe, but should I really be expecting a Nitrate reading of 10-15ppm this early?!
Day 6
I picked up another power head the next day so have 5,200lph of flow at the moment, although both powerheads can be toned down to 800lph each to bring it all down to 3,600lph if needs be!
Diatoms are blooming across the rock and substrate so things are going as planned. Am due to test ammonia levels tomorrow so am hoping to see things happening with the water chemistry in that sense too.
Day 8
Tank is in full bloom with diatoms and red hair algae now - looks horrible but it's a necessary evil!
Nothing much else happening although I'm going to start off my CUC hopefully soon so am looking forward to that! I was thinking 5 red legged hermits, 5 Nassarius, 5 Trochus and maybe a conch.
Current stats are :
Salinity : 1.025
pH : 7.8
KH : 2.68
Ammonia : 0
Nitrite : 0
Nitrate : 0 <---- still zero!
I'm currently suffering from millions of micro bubbles from the skimmer - I keep on tweaking it (and have modded the air intake) but I think it just needs a couple of days to calm down and hopefully the bubbles will stop.
Day 21
Quick update - tank has gone algae mad! Current stats are as follows :
Ammonia : 0ppm
Nitrite : 0ppm
Nitrate : 50ppm
So we're on the right track! Only two issues at the moment are these damn bubbles from the skimmer (I've spent countless hours trying to tweak it!) and as you can see quite alot of algae growth. I've reduced the amount of hours the lights are on (down from 12hrs to 10hrs) to try and calm it down a little, and hopefully this weekend if the nitrates drop I can add some CUC to deal with the worst of it.
I'm still dosing NOPOX so wasn't going to run any phosphate media, but I'm thinking now maybe it's a good idea to run some Rowaphos or equivalent alongside?
Day 24 and it's slowly getting there!
The majority of the green hair algae has been eating up by the CUC, and the reduction of nitrates and phosphates has cleared up the red stuff too.
I'm pretty pleased with the current stats :
Salinity : 1.025
pH : 7.8
KH : 2.72
Ammonia : 0
Nitrite : 0
Nitrate : 5
Phosphate : 0.04
Mg : 1300
Ca : 440
I'm still dosing NOPOX daily and will continue with the Red Sea Coralline Gro until the bottle runs out, and will then switch to the Reef Foundation supplements.
I've binned the Kent skimmer and squeezed in a TurboFlotor 500 - however I'm considering going skimmer-less because I've decided all internal skimmers are a pain in the ass!
I've also upped the return to 2 x 1000lph pumps for increased power through into the filter chambers, where I'm still running floss but have added a polyfilter, PhosGuard and MatrixCarbon running through an internal filter. My only issue now is that I'm struggling with temps! I'm not sure whether it's the 2 returns or the internal filter but something is heating the tank up and I'm still investigating what's the exact cause.
I don't intend to add any fish for a while yet, but have a load of frags on their way to me this week - just lots of different Zoas and Mushrooms - the easy stuff!
Will post pics once the frags are here!
Day 26
Still battling with high temps and still trying to find the source. I think at this stage it's the return pumps - I have 2 x Eheim compact 1000's, but they're both 23wt's each so must be kicking out a fair bit of heat. Might need to rethink this!
Frags have shipped and will be with me tomorrow!
Just joined up and thought I'd start of by creating my own tank diary to kick things off. I see lots of others using a Bio Reef 94L so am hoping to pick up some tips and tricks on what mods are possible etc.
I'll start off with day 1...
The last time I kept marines was almost 10 years ago - had a 300l FOWLR tank, but the cost of keeping it was too much back then. Anyway I recently had the idea to get another tank, but didn't want to go mad and get something big straight away (famous last words!) so decided to start small and apply the "quality over quantity" principle!
Found a friendly LFS a month ago and picked up a Kent Marine bio reef. The next day I picked up some water and live rock, and spent the afternoon putting it all together. This is definitely the exciting part!
I'm using 40lbs of fuji pink live sand and have 5kg of live rock so far. I know I need to get another 5kg or so, but I'm looking for some good pieces as the pieces I had that day didn't have as much fauna as I was expecting (I bought about 50kg for the last tank and it was pretty fresh!). Here's the tank with the sand and rock in place, with one of three 25l cans of saltwater being mixed/heated.
I set up the chambers as follows :
1. Heater
2. Filter floss (bought some of that)
3. Bag of carbon in the bottom and skimmer on top
4. Return pump
I binned the ceramic media etc. as advised by the LFS and folks on this forum. I intend to just swap out the floss and carbon as and when required and eventually add some phos-zorb. The filter seems OK although that return pump is a little weak - I appreciate why so many people here swap that out for something a little more powerful.
Starting to fill it up and immediately feel a little disappointed with the weedy amount of LR I bought! Still, was planning on visiting a couple of places later that week so will hopefully get some nice pieces.
Having read up that night I also bought a Red Sea reef mature pro kit, and a Red Sea marine care test kit. I intend to try out that 21 day cycling - mainly because it gives me something to do everyday! Finally got the last of the water in and everything is switched on...
I chucked in the couple of sachets of Biomagnet that came with the live sand. Figured it couldn't hurt and will speed up the water clearing. Temp is 26 °C and salinity 1.026 - a little at the high end so will keep an eye on that.
So now the waiting game I guess - I intended to go shopping for some more LR the next day and hopefully the water would have cleared up by then. Will start using the reef mature kit too which should start everything off nicely!
Now day 4 for the new tank and it seems to be cycling nicely.
I picked up another 5kg of live rock - a nice mix of regular Fiji and bluestone. It makes the existing live rock look all the more drab! I spent ages moving it all around trying to get it arranged nicely, and have so far settled on how it is in the pic below. Still not sure 100% though!
The three things I was trying to achieve were 1) hide the "ugly" live rock, 2) create plenty of flat surfaces thinking ahead for when I start adding corals etc. and 3) have some sort of seabed in the middle.
The thing on the left is a brine shrimp hatchery!
Couple more pics of the rock closer up...
You can see the diatom bloom has started on the piece at the back. And again here...
I've been following the Red Sea reef mature program and so far levels are as follows :
Salinity : 1.025
pH : 7.6 (seems very low, but I've changed the pump output to agitate the surface of the water so will keep an eye on this over the next week and see what happens. Also I'm raising the alkalinity up to 3 meq/l so as I far as I understand this should raise the pH too)
KH : 2.68
Ammonia : 0.4
Nitrite : 0.1
Nitrate : 0
Odd thing is though, according to the Red Sea documentation I should be seeing approximately :
Ammonia : 1
Nitrite : 0.1
Nitrate : 10-15
Ammonia and Nitrite I can believe, but should I really be expecting a Nitrate reading of 10-15ppm this early?!
Day 6
I picked up another power head the next day so have 5,200lph of flow at the moment, although both powerheads can be toned down to 800lph each to bring it all down to 3,600lph if needs be!
Diatoms are blooming across the rock and substrate so things are going as planned. Am due to test ammonia levels tomorrow so am hoping to see things happening with the water chemistry in that sense too.
Day 8
Tank is in full bloom with diatoms and red hair algae now - looks horrible but it's a necessary evil!
Nothing much else happening although I'm going to start off my CUC hopefully soon so am looking forward to that! I was thinking 5 red legged hermits, 5 Nassarius, 5 Trochus and maybe a conch.
Current stats are :
Salinity : 1.025
pH : 7.8
KH : 2.68
Ammonia : 0
Nitrite : 0
Nitrate : 0 <---- still zero!
I'm currently suffering from millions of micro bubbles from the skimmer - I keep on tweaking it (and have modded the air intake) but I think it just needs a couple of days to calm down and hopefully the bubbles will stop.
Day 21
Quick update - tank has gone algae mad! Current stats are as follows :
Ammonia : 0ppm
Nitrite : 0ppm
Nitrate : 50ppm
So we're on the right track! Only two issues at the moment are these damn bubbles from the skimmer (I've spent countless hours trying to tweak it!) and as you can see quite alot of algae growth. I've reduced the amount of hours the lights are on (down from 12hrs to 10hrs) to try and calm it down a little, and hopefully this weekend if the nitrates drop I can add some CUC to deal with the worst of it.
I'm still dosing NOPOX so wasn't going to run any phosphate media, but I'm thinking now maybe it's a good idea to run some Rowaphos or equivalent alongside?
Day 24 and it's slowly getting there!
The majority of the green hair algae has been eating up by the CUC, and the reduction of nitrates and phosphates has cleared up the red stuff too.
I'm pretty pleased with the current stats :
Salinity : 1.025
pH : 7.8
KH : 2.72
Ammonia : 0
Nitrite : 0
Nitrate : 5
Phosphate : 0.04
Mg : 1300
Ca : 440
I'm still dosing NOPOX daily and will continue with the Red Sea Coralline Gro until the bottle runs out, and will then switch to the Reef Foundation supplements.
I've binned the Kent skimmer and squeezed in a TurboFlotor 500 - however I'm considering going skimmer-less because I've decided all internal skimmers are a pain in the ass!
I've also upped the return to 2 x 1000lph pumps for increased power through into the filter chambers, where I'm still running floss but have added a polyfilter, PhosGuard and MatrixCarbon running through an internal filter. My only issue now is that I'm struggling with temps! I'm not sure whether it's the 2 returns or the internal filter but something is heating the tank up and I'm still investigating what's the exact cause.
I don't intend to add any fish for a while yet, but have a load of frags on their way to me this week - just lots of different Zoas and Mushrooms - the easy stuff!
Will post pics once the frags are here!
Day 26
Still battling with high temps and still trying to find the source. I think at this stage it's the return pumps - I have 2 x Eheim compact 1000's, but they're both 23wt's each so must be kicking out a fair bit of heat. Might need to rethink this!
Frags have shipped and will be with me tomorrow!
